Zapata Lives!

Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico

Lynn Stephen

Publication Year: 2002

This richly detailed study chronicles recent political events in southern Mexico, up to and including the July 2000 election of Vicente Fox. Lynn Stephen focuses on the meaning that Emiliano Zapata, the great symbol of land reform and human rights, has had and now has for rural Mexicans. Stephen documents the rise of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas and shows how this rebellion was understood in other parts of Mexico, particularly in Oaxaca, giving a vivid sense of rural life in southern Mexico. Illuminating the cultural dimensions of these political events, she shows how indigenous Mexicans and others fashioned their own responses to neoliberal economic policy, which ended land reform, encouraged privatization, and has resulted in increasing socioeconomic stratification in Mexico.

Mixing original ethnographic material drawn from years of fieldwork in Mexico with historical material from a variety of sources, Stephen shows how activists have appropriated symbols of the revolution to build the contemporary political movement. Her wide-ranging narrative touches on the history of land tenure, racism, gender issues in the Zapatista movement, local political culture, the Zapatista uprising of the 1990s and its aftermath, and more. A significant addition to our knowledge of social change in contemporary Mexico, Zapata Lives! also offers readers a model for engaged, activist anthropology.

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

List of Maps, Illustrations, and Tables

Acknowledgments

...The period during which this book was researched and
written, 1993–2001, was an important transitional era in Mexican history.
Marked by the beginning of the North American Free Trade Agreement,
the Zapatista rebellion, and the fall of the Institutional Revolutionary
Party from power after seventy-one years of presidential rule,
these years spun out tumultuous currents in Mexican politics, culture,
and society. Indigenous Mexicans organized at a...

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Preface

...As the year 1993 drew to a close, high-ranking members of Mexico’s
government prepared to celebrate the initiation of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on 1 January 1994. Approval of this
agreement by the U.S. Congress in fall 1993 closed years of preparation
and bargaining between the two countries. For those in the upper echelons
of Mexico’s government, those in the elite...

PART I. THE POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS OF ZAPATISMO

...The purpose of this chapter is twofold: to introduce relevant background
information, and, more important, to locate myself within the context of
my research in terms of my position in the international political economy,
my relationship to those I work with, and my ethical responsibilities
as an anthropologist—in other words, what is my role in the stories
told in this book, and how and why did...

2. Government Construction and Reappropriation of Emiliano Zapata

...This chapter looks primarily at one side of the interaction between the
Mexican government and local communities, focusing on how the government
mobilized Emiliano Zapata and the Mexican Revolution to
consolidate a postrevolutionary state and promote a dominant nationalism,
first in the 1920s and 1930s, then from 1990 through the end of
agrarian reform as Mexico restructured economically...

3. Ethnic and Racial Categories in Mexican History

...Chapter 2 describes government attempts to forge a discourse of unitary
nationalism built around Zapata and the Mexican Revolution in the
1930s and again in the 1990s. The next four chapters relate the specific
story of how indigenous men and women in eastern Chiapas ultimately
claimed Zapata and Zapatismo as their own, beginning in the 1980s. To
understand this contemporary story, we must first look...

PART II. ZAPATISMO IN EASTERN CHIAPAS

4. The Historical Roots of Indigenous Struggle in Chiapas

...1523 and 1531, laid the basis for the exploitation of the indigenous population.
Some communities in the Tzeltal- and Tzotzil-speaking highlands,
such as Chamula, Tenejapa, Oxchuc, and Huixtán, were able to
retain a communal land base during the colonial era (Favre 1984, 46).
Others almost completely lost their territorial base. Tojolabal, Tzotzil,
Tzeltal, and Ch’ol people were conscripted...

5. The New Zapatismo in the Lacandon Jungle

...In her mid fifties, Comandante Trinidad cuts an imposing figure at a
press conference. Unlike the female comandantes who participated in
the second round of peace dialogues between the Ejército Zapatista de
Liberación Nacional and the Mexican government during 1995 and
1996, Trini is from an older generation. Her long white hair reaches her
waist as it flows below the red bandanna she wears...

...Since its first appearance in the press in Mexico, the EZLN has used the
figure of Emiliano Zapata as a central symbol in communiqués written
by its supreme authority, the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary
Committee, constituted in early 1993. This chapter seeks in part to establish
how ejidatarios who formed and joined the EZLN in the Lacandon
region of Chiapas appropriated the dominant symbol...

7. Conversations with Zapatistas: The Revolutionary Law of Women and Military Occupation

...In eastern Chiapas, Zapatismo has been experienced in different ways
by communities and by individuals. The process of becoming a Zapatista
involves profound challenges and sacrifices for the young men and
women who make up the armed ranks of the insurgentes who live fulltime
in military training camps, as well as for the men, women, and children
in Zapatista base communities, who...

PART III. NEW AND OLD ZAPATISMO IN OAXACA

8. The Historical Roots of Land Conflict and Organizing in Oaxaca

...While both support for and opposition to the Zapatistas is well documented
in the case of Chiapas, little attention has been paid to the
reception to Zapatismo in other parts of rural Mexico. The next three
chapters are written as a historical comparison to the stories of the ejidos
of Guadalupe Tepeyac and La Realidad and to describe in detail the
ways ejidos formed in other primarily...

...In the ejidos of Santa María del Tule and Unión Zapata in Oaxaca, the
figures of Lázaro Cárdenas and Emiliano Zapata came to assume almost
familial status in local histories. Cárdenas personally visited both communities
during two trips to the region. As president of Mexico from
1934 to 1940, he was personally involved in either providing initial and
additional land grants, as in the case of Unión...

10. The Formation of the Ejido of Unión Zapata

...Please permit us to direct our attention to you in order to offer you
our most abundant thanks for the kind assistance that you have
sent to us in order to alleviate our precarious existence.
At the same time we are pleased to report to you that señor Ingeniero
D. Cliserio Villafuerte was in a meeting with the señor Delegate
of the Agrarian Department telling...

11. Contradictions of Zapatismo in Rural Oaxaca

...Santa María del Tule in the mid 1990s, and to explain how this contradiction
contributed to a vote for the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in El
Tule in the presidential elections of July 2000. The contradictory stance
involved is all the more interesting given important differences between
the two communities in ethnicity, economic activities, landholdings, and
education. Some of these differences...

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Mexican Nation for the Poor and the Indigenous South

...The local histories of Unión Zapata, Santa María del Tule, Guadalupe
Tepeyac, and La Realidad show that people appropriate aspects of national
identity for their own purposes. An “experiential knowledge of
the past transmitted through personal recollection can be harnessed
in the context of political action,” Joanne Rappaport observes (1994,
19). Government-claimed nationalist icons are reprogrammed with local
meaning and then mobilized in response to...

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